Sunday, October 9, 2011

"Best Practices" ...

Ok, I got one "best practices" too many. Consultants, colleagues, vendors, they all swear, breath and live by these magic words. "Best Practices".

When I hear that expression, I can't help but have a bunch of questions popping in my mind: who made them? What is the reference platform? What's the test scenario? What are the constraints and trade-offs? What are the limits?

But it seems that these "Best Practices" are universal. Got that software? Here are the best practices, they cover everything, all scenarios, all cases, have no constraints and have no limits. From Security, going through file servers, web servers and finally to database servers, Best Practices are everywhere. You're going to deploy that server with that OS? Here are the best practices, everything will run nice and smooth and you'll never have to change anything.

Too often, I'm under the impression that these best practices are just a substitute for some people's inability to understand what they're doing, what they're working with or their use cases, that these "Best Practices" are little short than "cook books" aimed at giving users a way to have something that will work OK in most of the cases, but that will never work "great".

Here are my list of "Best Practices". To be used with everything.

  • Understand your systems, most of all, know what the constraints and trade-offs are;
  • Understand your use cases, if possible, have a set of tests in a handy;
  • Read the "Best Practices", don't be ruled by them;
  • Read all the white papers and user cases you can. Try to find similarities;
  • If possible, have a test system you can tweak and break;
  • Document what you did, and when possible, share with the community at large.





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